


this is a warning sign, a battle cry

by argle_fraster



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Gen, Mild Language, PTSD, Pack Dynamics, Panic Attack, Self-Harm, dealing with assault
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-05
Updated: 2012-11-05
Packaged: 2017-11-18 00:57:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/555113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/argle_fraster/pseuds/argle_fraster
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It is a long journey towards being okay again. Lydia's winding road leads her to the pack, but only on her own terms.</p>
            </blockquote>





	this is a warning sign, a battle cry

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fleete](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fleete/gifts).



> There are heavy elements of the cycle of grief and acceptance while dealing with the aftermath of an assault here (a 4-stage process), so if you feel that this is something that will trigger you, please tread with caution. There are no pairings, though there is past Lydia/Jackson and implications for Lydia/Stiles, Lydia/Derek, and Lydia/Peter if you want to squint. This follows S2 with a few small divergences by way of conversations and small events.
> 
> Much thanks for sunsetpanic for the beta job. <3 To fleete: I hope that you enjoy this, and it was a joy writing for you. :)

In the days following the attack - in the days following her release from the hospital, her return to school, Lydia wakes up crouched on the floor writing mathematical equations on the wallpaper. They start at the baseboard and work their way around the room, until they double up and begin to form off-center cones of scribbles. She wakes up with ink staining her fingers and scrubs her hands until her nail beds bleed, and even then, it won't come off; it's like the stain goes straight through to her soul, like part of it blackened and curled and rotted where Peter Hale touched her.

She knows what all the equations mean, and what they stand for, and she hates that she does. She tries to go to school and forget everything.

There's a girls' bathroom at the end of the hall leading towards the gym that's barely used, and she spends a lot of time there, heaving over the sink and trying not to sob because it'll make her mascara run, with her palm pressed against the tampon dispenser like it's the only anchor to reality she has left.

\--

She has nightmares.

Sometimes, she doesn't know what they are: snippets of images, feelings. Sometimes they are vivid and sharp edges, and she sees Peter Hale, sees his teeth coming down - those leave her covered in a cold sweat when she wakes, fingers twisting knots into the sheets. She doesn't go back to sleep after those.

Allison wants to talk about the attack. _Are you okay? Are you sleeping?_

Lydia doesn't want to talk about the attack. If she talks about it, it won't ever go away. She wants to find her old life and bury herself in it; she wants to tunnel back to the place she used to live, before everything fell apart. She's still stepping on the shards and picking glass out of her feet.

She writes backwards on the white board, she sees Peter in the school: she isn't sure if any of it is real.

Lydia doesn't think she can ever go back, but she's so determined to try to forget that she ends having to throw up her breakfast every morning before she can take those steps up to the rows of lockers.

\--

When she wakes up in the Hale house, Peter's cracked fingernails are digging into Derek's arm and the haze that has been shrouding her life is gone. It's worth without it; she could at least pretend the fog kept her from seeing things, and now she doesn't even have that. It's like being naked and completely exposed. She's lost her shield.

Peter leaves the house. He doesn't even look at her, and she can't decide if it's better or worse that way. She stays where she is on the floor because her legs aren't responding at all. There's a layer of grime coating the boards that she knows is now clinging to her skirt, and somehow, she can't be bothered to care.

She tries to keep breathing, but it's hard when the only thing she can hear is the scream of her own sins against the thundering, shuddering beat of her heart.

It takes awhile for Derek to move - she still thinks it's less time than for a normal person. _Normal_. She doesn't know what normal is anymore. It's certainly not something she is. He finally moves, groaning, pushing himself up. He doesn't seem angry at her. He doesn't seem anything at all, and she's so tired of. She's so _exhausted_ at the people around her refusing to feel things that they should be.

"Are you going to kill me?" she asks, and is impressed that she doesn't cry. It comes out stronger than she anticipated.

She doesn't look up, because she doesn't want to read his expression. She can't bear to see what it might contain: disgust, maybe. Look at Lydia. Look at what Peter Hale managed to make her do. It's like seventh grade all over again, when the boys would whisper as she walked by - look at Lydia. Look at what she's _becoming_.

"No," Derek finally says. At the side of her vision, Lydia can see him standing. There's no unsteadiness in his feet against the broken boards.

"I did this," she whispers. "I did all of this."

There's a very long pause. Lydia's entire life could probably be spelled out in very long pauses; she doesn't know when it got to be that way. Suddenly, she doesn't know herself at all. The control was ripped from her fingers by a dead man, and she doesn't even think he's a man at all. He's not even an animal. He's just a monster.

"No, you didn't."

"Stop placating me," she snarls into the ground. Her hands ball into fists, but there's nothing to grab a hold of, so her fingernails just pinch the skin of her palms. She likes that it hurts. It gives her something to hold onto. "Everyone does that. Everyone talks to me like I'm _stupid_ , like I can't see what's going on. I _know_ what's going on, and I know it's my fault."

"You're immune," Derek says, and something in her snaps.

Lydia is up before she registers it - at least her legs are working again. Derek is just looking at her with an expression that doesn't even mean anything. There's no pity, no sympathy. There's nothing there, and she's so tired of there being nothing there when people look at her.

"Stop saying that!" she shouts. She sounds hysterical; if she heard herself, she'd be embarrassed, but she can't even be bothered to dwell on it. There's a hole in the floorboards where a dead man crawled out of, and there were worms in his skull that slid across her toes, and she's _angry_. "People keep saying that like it _means_ something. It doesn't mean that I'm immune to this _shit_ you are throwing at me. It doesn't mean I'm immune to the way you've all been treating me, the way you've been keeping everything from me."

She's in his face, finger pressed against his sternum. To his credit, maybe, he doesn't back up. "I'm still a _person_ ," she hisses, "which is more than I can say about _you_."

He doesn't stop her when she leaves, but she didn't think he was going to.

No one tries to stop her anymore.

\--

Her parents are gone when she gets back home. She expected nothing less.

There's moonlight streaming in her room - _moonlight_ , something she used to like - and she doesn't bother to close the window or the curtains. She screams at the orb hanging outside the window like it can change what's happened, like it can piece her life back together again. She stands in the middle of the room with her fingers tangled in her hair and wants to _pull_ , wants to rip it all out.

The numbers in the equations on the walls look dark in the uneven lighting. She hates them. She hates what they _mean_ , she hates why she knows them. It's not enough to launch herself at the wall and use her nails to tear through the wallpaper. It yields and crunches and breaks, but it's not enough. She pulls until it groans and tugs free from the drywall, crumpling in her hands in large, jagged chunks. She stands on her desk and breaks a bottle of Versace perfume and tears down all the bits of it that she can, until the numbers are gone and the equations are lying on the floor. She pulls down every last flower; the flowers her mother had let her pick out when she was ten and they were redecorating, and Lydia wanted her wallpaper to be covered with roses.

When she's done, she's taken hunks of plaster off the wall with the paper, and it's littering the carpet like a foul sort of snow, solid and real and damning. It embeds itself in her knees when she curls up in the middle of the floor, curling her arms around her head.

She can't breathe. She claws at her throat, but she can't find the air.

At some point, she falls asleep where she is. She wakes up the next morning looking at the ceiling with eyes that are swollen and sore from crying. There's an awful crick in her neck, and everything vaguely hurts when she pushes herself up. There's a torn bit of wallpaper stuck to her calf. She doesn't bother to pull it free.

It doesn't hurt to shove the paper and the bits of plaster into a large, black garbage sack. It's all just parts of her life that don't matter anymore, anyway.

\--

The next day, she finds a can of paint in the garage. She sort of remembers why it's there - her father wanted to refinish something, do something _meaningful_ with his hands and time, and like all his projects, it ended before he ever started. It's an awful sort of green color, light and yellow-tinted.

Lydia takes it to her room and paints the walls with it. She paints over the remnants of mathematical formulas that bled through the paper. She paints over the third dimension that her world had suddenly exploded into. It looks like sick plants in the autumn, waiting to wilt and die but clinging to life stubbornly anyway, even knowing the winter is coming.

It's really a rather fitting metaphor for her life, and she can still appreciate the irony of it.

\--

She goes back to the Hale House.

She doesn't even know why. Half of her never wants to see the gutted building again, and another part of her yearns for the faint, sweet smell of the rotting, burned wood that still stands. She goes back knowing full well that Peter might be there and finding herself both relieved and irritated when he isn't.

It's only Derek. Derek makes her jittery, like her bones want to jump out from her skin.

If he's surprised to see her, he hides it well.

"Tell me about my immunity," she says, without preamble. She's not giving him a way out - _she_ hasn't gotten a way out yet, and she'll drag the rest of them down with her.

"I don't know how it works," Derek tells her. He's moving around, but she can see him keeping her always in the corner of his vision. She doesn't want this to increase her opinion of him; it does anyway. "I've never heard of anyone being immune before."

"Your family," she says, just because she knows it hurts. She wants it to hurt. She's been wanting everyone around her to hurt the same way she is for weeks, and this is one of the first knives she's found that she can twist.

His gaze darkens, looking more guarded. "What about them?"

"Allison said some of them were human. That they weren't all born with this like you were."

She waits until he says, "That's true." It feels like the confirmation she didn't know she needed.

"How did it work?" she asks. "They were immune, too?"

"It's not the same," Derek says, and shakes his head. "They weren't bitten, they just didn't get the hereditary gene passed down. There's something different at work here. You aren't just immune to the bite - you're immune to the kanima's poison, too."

It's not an answer. Lydia just wants an _answer_ ; she wants to be able to go home at night and not be afraid of the shadows lingering in the corners. The house stinks of Peter Hale, and she hates that she knows that. She hates the _scent_ of him, like wilted flowers and dead leaves.

She doesn't know what she came here for. It seemed obvious, but now it's not, and at some point between the creaking old porch and Derek, she lost it. It makes her frustrated, all the things she's lost - there isn't anything that's still _her_ anymore. Even the formulas that used to make sense, with the rules that didn't vary and the solid, real answers at the end, don't feel the same anymore.

There's an angry sort of growl, and it takes her a moment to realize it's coming from her own throat. It's _awful_ : the sound between crying and whining. She's not an animal and she's not a human, because she's not _anything_. She pitches forward and grabs a hold of Derek's shoulders and uses all the weight she's got to send him stumbling backwards. Peter isn't here, but Derek is, and he's one of them, he's just the same. She screams her frustrations into his shoulders as she beats her hands against them. She hasn't had anything to rail against in so long.

"Lydia," Derek tries, and she can't bear to hear him say her name like he _knows_ her.

Instead, she rakes her nails across his face and feels sick when she likes the noise he makes in response, tripping backwards again. She pushes once more, because she's winning, somehow, she's _winning_. By the time Derek senses the need to fight back, his shove against her is useless and she remembers her training from self-defense class in gym. They'd taught the girls how to catch an attacker off-guard.

Lydia wishes she'd remembered it that night on the lacrosse pitch. The realization tastes bitter at the back of her throat and fuels her forwards. She kicks at the back of Derek's knee with enough force to get him on the ground, and then she is on him with the knife pulled free from her boot, the knife Allison gave her. She wishes she'd had that the night of the attack, too.

She presses the edge against Derek's throat. He's not really moving, but she's breathing hard.

"If I'd turned, I'd have ripped your throat out," she hisses.

She knows she only won because he didn't shift against her; she's still human, and he didn't use his strength against her. There's something about the realization of it that makes her angrier than she has been in a very long time. She's good enough to be used as a fall-back option, but not to fight against. She's _frail_.

Derek is staring at her. She wants to move the knife. She wants to.

"If I were pack, what would you do?" she asks. "Would you keep me in line like them? Would you throw your weight around to get me to do the same things that Peter had me do? Is that what it would be like?"

"No," Derek says, and she actually believes him. "I'm not like him."

She wants to throw up. She can feel the bile rising in her throat, and she forces it back down.

"You're all like him," she spits. But she stands up and re-sheathes the knife. She wonders if Allison would be proud of how she used it. "You're all monsters."

When she leaves, she sits in the driver's seat of her mother's car and sobs against the steering wheel for a long time. Derek doesn't come out to check on her. She hates him for that, too. 

In the back of her mind, she thinks she might be the worst monster of them all.

\--

The dreams stop, but it's mostly because she's not sleeping. It's not an improvement. At least her foundation can cover the dark circles under her eyes when she sits in front of the mirror in the morning, painting on the face she used to know by heart.

\--

After school one day, she smells something sweet in her room when she gets home. It's the wrong kind of sweet, the kind that smells like _him_. She almost falls over when she walks in the door because her breath catches and her pulse jumps; she feels like she just ran three miles. She can't breathe. It's in her room, he's put it in her room - she throws herself to the ground. She can see it growing out of the carpet. It's blue and purple and overpowering, and it's clouding up her mind.

She rips the carpet free from the corner before she realizes she's crying. It's the ugly sort of crying; the kind where she's hiccupping sobs that ache all the way out, that nearly make her keel over with the force like her body can't possibly withstand the onslaught. She tears at the carpet, desperate to find the source.

Everything is purple and blue and Peter Hale.

It's only when things get red that she stops. She's bleeding - ripping up the carpet has driven staples into her cuticles, and her nails are ravaged. There's blood all over the bits she hasn't managed to pull up from the boards yet. She tries to suck in air and her lungs have stopped working. She wants to scream, and she doesn't have the oxygen to get the sound out. When she presses a hand against her lips, she can taste the copper pang of the blood.

As she cries, low and anguished and _desperate_ , Lydia looks up at her vanity.

There are flowers there: roses. Pink, her favorite color. There's a note amidst the blooms and she can't read the words, but she does know her mother's handwriting. It's the usual gift when her mother feels a stab of guilt for not paying enough attention to her. A consolation prize, of sorts: _dearest Lydia, sorry I'm not here for you. Love, Mom._

Roses, not wolfsbane.

It's worse then, when she sags against the wall and cries. It's worse because it wasn't real. None of it was real - she can't tell the parts of her life that happened from the parts that didn't anymore.

She can't be there anymore. She barely remembers to grab her purse before she's out the door, driving on instinct. She goes to Allison's house and there's no answer. Allison should be home. Lydia has half a mind to shriek and pound against the glass, but she knows there wouldn't be any point to it.

There's nowhere to go.

She's never felt so alone.

\--

Somehow, Lydia finds herself outside of Safeway. She doesn't remember driving there. The thing about the supermarket is that it's always open. When she goes inside, there are people there - normal people. Mothers getting off long shifts getting food for their children. Teenagers loitering near the chips. Cashiers who would rather be somewhere else than behind the register.

There's something calming about it. Somehow, she doesn't feel like crying anymore. Maybe she used up her allotment of tears for the day - maybe that's how life works.

Back in the parking lot, she sees Stiles. He's loading a few bags into the back of his Jeep. It's seen better days. By the time she crosses to where he's parked, he's sitting in the driver's seat fiddling with his phone. Lydia doesn't bother knocking; she just opens the passenger side and slides in.

"Oh, dear god!" he exclaims, and drops his phone completely. It clatters somewhere under his seat.

"Do you think I'm crazy?" she asks. She stares out the windshield at the family with the toddler riding in the shopping cart.

"Right at this moment, or in a general sense?" he replies.

It's terrible how it makes her laugh. The problem is, once she starts laughing, she can't stop. It hurts almost as much as the furious sobbing earlier did, and she isn't sure when the two wires crossed in her head, but they did. She laughs so hard she's crying and her stomach burns.

Stiles is looking at her like he doesn't understand how she found it so funny - he looks hopeful, and a little sad, and that just sets her off again, and she doesn't know why. At some point during her hyena impression, he'd found his phone. It's back in his hand like it's a permanent fixture.

"Lydia?" he says.

"Oh, my god, I'm crazy," she half-sobs, half-laughs. Most of it ends up muffled in her hands anyway. "I am, I'm crazy."

At least Stiles isn't inching away from her. She'll give him that. "You aren't crazy."

"You never made up the talk you said we'd have," she says, and it's all coming out now. Stiles isn't a werewolf. Stiles isn't Peter Hale; Stiles is _safe_. Stiles is terrible plaid shirts with fraying hems, who smiles like she lights up the room and knows she could run circles around him academically and seems to like her anyway. Stiles is the furthest and closest to normal she has. "People never _do_ the things they say they are going to do. Everyone is ignoring me."

He looks abashed. "No one could ever ignore you," he says. "I'm pretty sure it's physically impossible to. Especially the way you walk through the halls like you own the place, or at least have a very influential, impressive share in the stock, so that-"

" _Stop_ ," she says. She's stopped laughing - and crying. She misses it immediately. She _felt_ something, and now it's back to nothing. Empty. She feels like Peter Hale cut out all the parts of her that mattered and left them aching on the ground when he walked away.

Stiles looks like he wants to say something else and is biting it back.

"Everything else is more important," Lydia sighs. She's just drained now.

"It's not," Stiles argues. It's sad how much she wants to believe him. Like Derek, she wants to believe him. She sort of hates that she actually does.

She tugs at a curled strand of her hair, just to give her fingers something to do. "I know there's all this shit happening, and I get that it's important, but everyone is running away so fast that nobody has bothered to turn around to look for me."

"That's not true," Stiles says. His phone is gone, disappeared back into a pocket somewhere. "I mean, I know we've been kind of distant and shit, I _know_ we haven't told you things, and I'm really sorry for that, and I'm not saying that things are more important than you, it's just that-"

"I don't want to be alone tonight," Lydia interrupts.

There's not even a half second before Stiles answers with, "Okay." He starts the Jeep's engine, then falters a bit. "What do you want to do?"

"Nothing," Lydia says. She's exhausted. She's trapped on a roller coaster she can't see the emotional turns of - she feels like she's thirteen again, pining over a boy in biology class. She's never felt less like herself. "I don't care."

Stiles takes her to his house.

"My dad's at work," he explains, and Lydia knows about him losing his badge. She doesn't ask what the Sheriff is doing now, and Stiles doesn't offer. He just awkwardly goes to the living room and gestures at the couch, mumbling something about how old it is and _don't mind the rips, we used to have a cat_. It molds around Lydia's weight when she sits down.

He puts on some movie Lydia's never seen. She doesn't watch more than five minutes before she dozes off, lulled by the sound of Stiles' normal, stable, solid breathing. For the first time in a long time, she feels safe enough to relax. The Stilinskis' couch is warm and soft, and the sounds of the television remind her of the times she used to fall asleep while her father watched the news.

Stiles feels safe.

When Lydia wakes, the television is still going. She's curled up against the arm of the couch and there's a blanket draped over her shoulders. Stiles is still on the other end, an entire cushion between them. His eyes are on the screen, but she knows he's seen her moving, so he knows she's awake again.

He doesn't make her leave, and she doesn't volunteer it. Her car is still at the supermarket.

"We'll just get it tomorrow," Stiles says. "We can go before my dad gets off his night shift."

She doesn't know what it is they watch. It doesn't really matter.

\--

Allison isn't at school the next day, but Peter Hale is.

She sees him down the hall, near the stairs. He's not looking at her, but she knows he's seen her, and she knows he is waiting for her. The wave of fear hits her so hard she ends up falling back into the lockers. The air is gone. Her chest is tightening. If she didn't know any better, she'd think she was having a heart attack by the way it feels that his hand has reached through her skin to squeeze the life out of her.

Her world is blue flowers and burned-out eye sockets. Lydia closes her eyes, pressing the heel of her hand against them so hard she sees white. She recites the quadratic formula in her head. She works through the periodic table. She's mid-way through the valence variations of the transition metals when a hand wraps around her elbow, and she starts so violently that she almost drops her books.

Peter Hale is still standing down the hall. He's looking at her, watching her: marking. He's marking his territory.

"Lydia," Stiles says. She thinks he's been repeating it for a minute.

Lydia blinks, and Peter is gone.

"Lydia!" Stiles says again.

"Yeah," Lydia breathes. She's still alive, and Peter is gone, and the world goes back to spinning around her. She's a puppet with cut strings. Puppets can't dance without their masters.

Stiles' fingers close more firmly around her arm. "Allison's mother is dead."

\--

No one answers the door at Allison's house. Lydia waits for an hour, sitting on the stoop, because she knows someone is home. Allison won't answer her phone either. She's at a loss for what to do. She feels useless. Allison's mother is dead, and Allison is grieving, and Lydia is sitting on her front steps wondering how the hell life fell apart like it did.

She goes back home after leaving a message on Allison's voice mail.

She has a nightmare that night.

Lydia wakes up with her body screaming. For several wild, frenzied moments, she is convinced that she's in the Hale house again. She can smell the acrid stench of human decay, of flesh that's burned clean. It's enough to send her to the bathroom, retching in the toilet. She's shaking so bad her hands keep hitting the porcelain of the sink's edge when she tries to brush her teeth afterwards.

The striped green color of her walls makes her want to be sick again. She walks outside without any shoes on. She feels claustrophobic in her own house; the empty, lonely shell that is supposed to keep the monsters out and only succeeds in inviting them in. She goes out without knowing where she's walking. It's dark, and cold, and she's a stupid girl in a horror movie walking through the woods alone.

She knows what's in these woods. It will find her anyway.

Part of her wants it to.

She finds a clearing and waits. She doesn't know where he is, but she guarantees that he knows where _she_ is. Seeing him at the school wasn't an accident. Peter Hale is going to reclaim his prize. She's been a ghost since he hollowed her out anyway.

Lydia stands in the clearing, under the light of the dipping moon, and waits.

"I know you're there," she chokes out, to the darkness. She pulls her arms up, skirt riding high. She's a sacrificial lamb standing on the precipice of the volcano. She's the blood that will bring down the rains and still the wrath of the gods. She knows those stupid stories from history; she always hated those girls. They didn't fight back. Maybe they felt like she does: empty.

Maybe Peter Hale was there, too, in their minds. Maybe he whispered sweet nothings to them, caressed their cheeks with decaying fingers more bone than skin.

"I know you're there!" she repeats, louder. "If you want me, then just do it!"

There is nothing. Only the sound of the insects and her furious, desperate desire to see the end.

Frustrated, she finds a branch and breaks it off with a growl. He has to be there. She feels his gaze on the back of her neck. He's prolonging it because he can - he's proving that she's his. If he won't come to her, then she'll go to him.

She isn't far from the Hale House. No matter where she ends up going, she always seems to find her way there. It's like the siren's call, only it's matted with despair and guilt and the awful stinging sensation at the back of her tongue. For a long time, she stands outside it. She can see the outline and the sides of the windows in the rising sun. Still, Peter doesn't come.

"Just do it!" she shrieks. "Come and claim your prize! You won, you fucking won, just-"

There's a rock at her feet. She picks it up and hurls it towards the house with as much force as she can muster. It hits harmlessly against the siding, but it's started something. She finds another, and another, and eventually she hits one of the windows. The resulting shatter is worth it.

"Come and get me!" she screams. Her throat feels raw. She lands another rock against the glass, and there are shards littering the ground. She doesn't even notice them when she's blindly grappling through the grass for more projectiles. The rocks start slipping out of her hands from the blood, and she keeps throwing. She might run out of rocks, and she might lose her voice, but she's taking out the windows one by one.

He doesn't come.

"I hate you!" she yells at the house, standing silent. She throws a rock and it bounces off the gutted porch. "I hate you!"

Blood smears across her thighs when she pitches onto the ground. Even now, she is unwanted. Unwanted by the very man who tore her away from everything. Peter Hale won't even come to end the game of cat and mouse, and she can't do it herself.

"Dammit," she chokes. "Damn you."

Allison's mother is dead, and it shouldn't be her. It should have been Lydia, all those months ago.

She closes her fingers around bits of glass just to feel the sting of the edges piercing her flesh.

"Lydia," Derek says, from behind her.

"No," she says.

There are hands on her shoulders. She should hate Derek Hale. She's not sure why, but she thinks she should; Derek is one of them. Derek is the reason Peter used her. Derek is the answer she keeps getting to the equations, even when she changes the variables. Lydia could carve the numbers into her arms and it would still come out the same.

The fingers on her shoulders tighten a bit. "Lydia."

"I hate you," she whispers. She's crying again. She doesn't know when she started. She's so tired of crying. She's exhausted with feeling so raw and wrong inside - she trails her tongue slowly across her bottom lip and tastes the salt of her own tears there.

"Come on," Derek says, and helps her to her feet. Her palms are throbbing.

"I hate you," she tries again.

"I know," he replies.

They're both terrible liars.

\--

He takes her inside, to the basement. It looks like a medieval torture chamber, and Lydia wonders briefly if Stiles has ever said just that - he seems like the person who would mention those things around Derek without a care for what happens afterwards.

Still, it's more livable than the burned out bits above.

Lydia sits down on a chair and stares at the crimson coating her palms until Derek wraps a wet towel around her hands and all she can see is the blue of it. She hates blue. God, she hates that color of blue.

"What is he going to do with me now?" she asks. She feels stupid, like some idiot of a woman who keeps going back to an abusive boyfriend. She hates those women. She hates herself more.

"I don't know," Derek says.

She snorts a bit, unbecoming. "At least you're honest."

"Not one of my better traits."

"Do you _have_ good traits?" Lydia asks, challenging. Her hands are stinging. He put something on the towel, because it feels like it's burning. It's probably hydrogen peroxide. She can't figure out why he would need something like that surrounded by people who heal themselves. "Because it looks like you make a pretty shitty leader."

"Alpha," he corrects, but doesn't refute her statement on his abilities.

"It's the same thing, isn't it?"

He shrugs, pulling a bit of the towel up so he can look at the gashes on her hands. "Maybe."

"Can't you do some creepy thing with smelling people?" she asks. "Like some sort of dog?"

Derek just looks at her. It'd be rattling if she had anything left to rattle.

"What do you smell on me?" she continues.

"Self-doubt," he says. He removes the towel and dabs more of the liquid with one of the corners; it stings enough to make her hiss. "Anxiety. Loneliness."

"Well, take me now, sailor."

One corner of his mouth quirks up a bit. If she avoids looking down at her hands, she can't see the way her blood has soaked into the blue towel and stained it purple. For someone who has probably never needed medical attention like this, Derek is painfully thorough with his work. His hands are gentle. She almost wishes they weren't.

"If I'd turned," she starts, and swallows hard, "would I belong to him?"

"That's not how it works," he says.

"You can feel them, though," she says. "You can control them. You have the power to make them obey." There's a moment of long silence. Her hands are looking better: cleaner, at least. Then she says, "I saw things, through Peter. I saw you."

This gets his attention. Lydia doesn't like the memories she gained through Peter Hale. They taste like ash. They are dead and buried, but so was he, and she doesn't know if anything is ever really dead anymore. Allison's mom is, probably. She should feel worse about that.

"I saw your sister."

"Laura," Derek says, sounding pained.

"Do you miss your family?" Lydia asks.

Derek shakes his head. "It's not important. Being an alpha is about creating a new family."

"Seems important to me."

"I didn't finish," Derek says. When she looks up in question, he adds, "With what I smelled on you."

Torn somewhere between curiosity and anxiety, Lydia is afraid he'll say _Peter_. "Fine," she tries, and it doesn't sound as nervous as she'd feared. "What else do you smell?"

"Power," Derek tells her. "Stiles says you're a genius."

"Stiles talks too much."

The towel is back on her hands, with Derek's fingers pressing it down. "You'd have made a great werewolf."

The way he talked about family, about it being his job to create a new one - Lydia thinks of Allison's mother and her unanswered phone calls to Allison's phone. She thinks about Scott and Stiles, best friends who can't seem to remember what that used to mean. She doesn't think her parents will have noticed that she's gone.

"I wish I were," she whispers. "I wish I were part of the pack."

She doesn't know how fiercely she means it until the words are out of her mouth. She feels stupid for several long seconds, until Derek gently unwinds the towels from her hands again.

"I think you're okay. Do you need a ride?"

There's an ache in her chest thudding in time with her heartbeat. She doesn't know what it means. She gingerly touches the torn bits of her palm; strange, they don't seem to hurt anymore.

"No," she says. "I think I'll take the long way home."

\--

Jackson's lights are off. She doesn't know if he's home. She stands outside his house, feeling like she did when she was standing outside of Allison's - like she's waiting. She was waiting for Peter Hale to claim her as his own, and he never came.

Lydia is very tired of waiting.

There's movement within the house, and it might be him. She still has his key. For a moment, she contemplates leaving it on the stoop for him or his parents to find, and then decides against it. If he wants it back still, he can collect it himself. She spent last night standing in a forest, begging the man who tried to kill her to finish it. She's done. With the adrenaline wearing off, she's exhausted; she hasn't slept. But there's something else there, something she hasn't felt in a long time - determination.

The slices across her palms are a reminder. If she'd been a werewolf, she'd have healed by now. Logically, she knows this. She knows that if she were a wolf, Peter would be controlling her. She would obey him.

She is also very tired of obeying.

She doesn't knock on Jackson's door. His father is probably awake now, with the sun rising, and getting ready for work. Lydia gets back in her car with Jackson's key still in her purse and ends up at at the 24-hour Walmart on the edge of town. She's lucky she has a pair of flip-flops in the trunk of the car.

She has to look a fright, wandering through the aisles. Her hair is probably collecting twigs and leaves. Derek hadn't bothered to bandage her hands, so they are still pink and in the right angle, the slashes can be seen. Lydia doesn't care. She would have. The old Lydia would have cared - the old Lydia would have gone home to change, to shower, to meticulously curl her hair before anyone saw her.

But it's barely 5:30 AM, and the old Lydia died that night on the pitch.

Peter Hale didn't turn her that night. For the first time, she feels a fierce, sudden pang of relief over it. It's been a long time since she cared enough to be thankful for something like that. She stands in front of the rows of paint samples and lets her fingertips trail over them, arranged in a spectrum rainbow. She doesn't need to be a werewolf to be important; she just _is_.

She thinks of Stiles and spending the night watching television on his couch. She thinks of Allison and her questions about translating an ancient Latin book about monsters, about Scott and the way he locked them in the chemistry lab to keep them safe. She thinks of Derek's hands cleaning her fingers, when he should have just shifted and sent her running.

Her fingers settle on a violet-blue square.

"This one," she tells the sales clerk. "One gallon."

\--

Back in her sickly-green room, she hauls her bed to the middle and pushes her vanity to one side, so that there is an entire wall exposed. If the blue is going to be the weapon Peter planted in her, then she is going to take it back. She refuses to be scared every time she sees something the color of wolfsbane; she's too good for that. Her palms are throbbing from where the glass cut, but she's still too good for that. She's too good for all of it.

In the garage, she finds her father's unused paint brushes. In sixth grade, art class was her second favorite class. She liked blending the colors together in increments, calculating the ratio so she could find the perfect pigment.

There's no blending in her life now. There's no formula to follow, and she was so thrown by it that she kept stumbling through the steps.

On the splash of open wall, Lydia paints.

By the time she's done, she's aware that she's missed school. She can't find it in herself to care - her grades will be fine. The wolfsbane curls up in delicate tendrils and cyma curves from the baseboards. Against the blue, the green doesn't look quite so bad. Maybe it's not plants dying in autumn. Maybe it's the first buds poking through the snow in spring instead.

There's a flowering wolfsbane painted on her wall, and Lydia sits on her bed staring at it for a long time. It's hers, now.

\--

Allison doesn't answer Lydia's phone calls. Lydia isn't quite sure what to _do_ ; she's aware that Allison has to be hurting, but she's being shut out. She's beyond done with being shut out of people's lives - like she has no place there. Like she's something that people can brush under the rug to hide when they are cleaning up the foyer.

There are a few people who haven't shut her out yet, and she finds herself drawn to them. She _needs_ to belong, to pick up the shattered pieces and try to fit them back together. Maybe, if she does it right, she'll make something better than the original - she can only hope it works like that.

She goes to the lacrosse game and finds Ms. McCall in the stands, sitting next to the Sheriff. It's standing there, cheering, watching Stiles _win_ , watching him fling the ball into the net with more grace than she's ever seen from him - it's standing there that she feels like herself again. Not her old self, because she'll never be that again, but something new. Something closer to what she was. There are people around her who _care_ , and the feeling is slowly replacing the dead space that Peter Hale left behind.

She watches Stiles play, and her heart swells with something like pride.

And then Jackson is on the field, on the ground, and Lydia's hands are covered in sticky blood, and she might be screaming. The sound that's being wrenched out of her mouth is horrible. Someone grabs her and takes her away, because it's _awful_ , and she doesn't know where her heart is anymore.

Jackson was still in there, thrumming wildly, and she wasn't prepared for this.

There is nothing that could have prepared her for this.

\--

She doesn't go home.

Lydia goes to the woods.

Down in the grass, in the leaves that have pooled there and curled over on themselves, brown and brittle, she sinks her fingers into the ground and tries to breathe. Jackson is _dead_ \- gone. Not just gone from her life, but _gone_. He'd pushed and shoved and cut her out, and she can still feel the serrated edges of the knife he used, but it was still Jackson; he was still in her veins, in her blood.

She can't cry. She can't get the sounds out. She can't get _anything_ out. She feels like her carefully re-crafted existence is starting to fall apart again. Lydia can't handle losing it all once more - she can't deal with the gaping wounds that ache and ache in the middle of the night, below her breastbone and rattling into her stomach.

Somehow, she gets herself back up and to her mother's car again. She doesn't know how long it's been, but the moon is out. The moon always seems to be out.

She drives to the Stilinskis' house.

The Sheriff lets her in. Stiles is covered in bruises - there's one on his cheek that sweeps upwards like a splash of dark crimson paint. Lydia can only focus on the edges, because she can't get anything to snap into place.

"Hey," Stiles says, like he doesn't quite know what to say.

"I still have his key," she tells him. He doesn't ask who; he has to know. The key is burning a hole in her purse like the last thing anchoring them together. Jackson is gone, and she still has his key, and whatever may or may not have been between them is gone now. It's wiped out.

Stiles just looks at her. He has a way of not looking like he's sympathetic - because that would be terrible - and not like he's pitying her - because that would make her angry. He's just Stiles, the rock that everything crashes up against, still standing tall. It's knowing that he's here, that he's _here_ : it's the thing that makes everything fall apart. She'd been holding it in and she just can't anymore.

"I still have his key," she sobs, and she can't see because the tears are blinding. Maybe this is what you are supposed to do for someone who died - cry. Lydia wonders if this is what Allison is doing, too. Crying and crying and trying to keep breathing, to keep from dying along with them.

Stiles just puts his arms around her and his chin rests on the top of her head, and they sit on his bed for a long time as she cries a wet, wobbly circle onto the shoulder of his shirt.

"What do I do now?" she asks. She doesn't know. She can't see that far.

Outside Stiles' window, the sliver of the moon is sparkling in the sky, unobstructed by clouds.

"You live," Stiles tells her. His arms tighten, and she soaks them up greedily. When he's holding onto her, she knows she won't float away - she won't get lost. "You breathe. You get up in the morning. You brush your teeth. And you tell yourself that the next day will get better, even if you don't believe it."

Jackson was the first boy to ever kiss her like he really meant it. Like she was more than a trophy, more than a short skirt and too-high heels. Lydia buries her face against Stiles' neck and tries to drink in as much of him as she can - he smells a bit like the moon, a bit like the Hale house. The strange contradiction of scents no longer makes her stomach churn. It smells like home.

"I'm sorry," she says, and she doesn't know what she's apologizing for.

"I know," he replies. "It's okay."

Lydia hiccups and stares out the window at the crescent hanging above the tree line.

\--

In scales, Jackson looks like a monster. It tears at her, because she doesn't like the way the two images overlap. She is so afraid she feels like she's standing back in the woods with Peter Hale whispering in her ear, so terrified that her legs won't obey her will to move. She just stands there, staring at eyes that used to mean so much, and holds out the key. Her lifeline.

"Here," she whispers, and can't think. She can't breathe. The world hangs motionless in the abyss between them, in the line that is so deep and long she doesn't think they can ever cross it again.

Jackson's face smooths; the scales disappear. He's himself and he's not a monster, and he stares at Lydia like he knows her again. And then he's coughing up blood from the claws sunk deep into his waist, spitting life out on the floor in coagulated clumps, and she can't even scream. She can't _move_.

He's dead all over again, and she's pressing her hands against his face before she realizes her feet carried her over to him.

It's cruel to do it twice. It's too much for her heart to handle. She presses a hand against his chest, smeared with his own blood that fans out in the shape of her fingers.

"I love you," she says, and kisses his forehead.

Once upon a time, it used to be true.

\--

After everything, after Jackson is a wolf instead - shaped by the moon just like the others, moved by something that Lydia wishes she could fully understand - they circle each other without getting close. She calls him to make sure he's alright, to make sure his heart is beating again, and the conversation is relatively short. There's none of the old fire, but also none of Jackson's most recent cutting barbs, and it's so polite it's almost sickening.

On the night of the full moon, Lydia goes to Allison's house. She finds Allison in her bed, curled beneath the covers, after Chris lets her in. There might be too much between them, now: months of lies, Peter Hale, the moon hanging low outside. But Lydia crosses the space of Allison's bedroom anyway, climbing up onto the bed and curling herself around the other girl's unmoving form.

"How do you deal with this?" Allison whispers into the pillowcase. Her room is like the ghost of its former self, stripped of the things that used to make Allison who she was. Lydia feels like an intruder in a hotel room saved for some other purpose - it makes her uncomfortable.

"It's just life," Lydia tells her. She presses her chin into Allison's shoulder, squeezing gently. She can feel Allison's uneven, erratic breaths against her form. "You just have to keep living."

"It's like I don't know how," the other girl says. "Like... there's something wrong with me, that I can't do this."

How long have they been keeping things from each other? Lydia thinks it has to end; it has to end if they both want to be okay. "There's nothing wrong with you."

"How do you know?"

"Because I know what's wrong with me," Lydia says, "and you're different."

There are holes in both of their hearts, now - big, people-shaped holes that will never get refilled but, in time, might be paved over so that life can continue. Those holes never really go away. Scott and Jackson, Allison's mom, Peter Hale: it doesn't matter who made the space. It all aches the same way.

"You're strong," Lydia tells her. She's never believed anything more.

Allison sniffs, and curls her fingers around Lydia's. "So are you."

"Then let's do it together," Lydia says.

\--

Peter Hale is still at the Hale House. There's something disconcerting about it, and Lydia doesn't like being around him, but at least now, when she looks at him, she can remain upright and stoic. She no longer feels like her existence is tied to the creature, to the _thing_ \- more monster than man, really - who almost ripped it away with his own teeth.

Besides, she is there to see Derek, not Peter. She knows Peter is near, because she can feel him crawling through the structure like an itch beneath her skin.

"Sometimes, I feel things," she admits, with her arms wrapped around herself, like she can hold the awful truth inside so no one can see it. "Things I shouldn't be able to feel. Like the others. I can feel them. And the moon; I can feel that, too."

Derek doesn't say anything. He's turned away, but she knows he's listening. She can sense that, too, and it's strange. The tether to Peter is a stone in her belly; the cord to Derek is better. It makes her feel bigger instead of smaller.

"Do you think there's something wrong with me?" she asks. She's afraid of the answer, but she can't go on without knowing anymore. Sometimes, you just have to face the things that keep you awake at night.

"I don't know," he answers. She appreciates that he's honest - people aren't usually honest with her. He shakes his head a bit, as if he's trying to sort out his own thoughts. "I don't think so. You're human, but you're... not. It's almost like you're both."

"Not quite a member of either world," Lydia says.

"Maybe it's not like that," Derek tells her. When he turns to look at her again, his eyes are as stormy as the ocean. "You get to ... you get to _exist_ and go between them. You're not all human, but you're not wolf, either. You get a lot more choices than the rest of us do."

Lydia thinks on this for a moment. It doesn't sound so bad, painted that way.

Peter is in the foyer, and she can feel him. She wants him to stay there, for him to listen - for him to see that this is _her_ choice, and that he can't take it away from her again. He might have made her this way, but it's her show from here on out. She's taking back what she lost.

"If I'd turned, I'd be in Peter's pack," she says, and it's more statement than question, even though she expects a response.

"Yes," Derek replies.

She juts her chin out, straightening her shoulders. "So, since he didn't turn me, but I'm not totally a human, does this mean I get to choose?"

There's a long moment of silence, and then Derek nods, once, sort of hesitantly; he's not quite sure what to do, either. It makes her feel better to know this. She doesn't feel like the only one fumbling along each step of the way.

"Then I choose you," she says. "As an alpha. As my pack."

He doesn't say anything. There's a swell of fear, turning her insides cold, and she adds, "Can I be part of your pack?"

Derek gets up. Lydia isn't afraid of him, but she is surprised when he takes her face in his hands, calluses rough against her cheeks, and kisses her on the forehead.

"Stupid girl," he whispers against her temple. "You already are."

Lydia reaches up to wrap her fingers around his wrists, and just breathes.

\--

She's getting used to the strange runs to Home Depot in the middle of the night. She gets more paint this time, and she gets so much it requires a cart to get it back to her car. It's strange, watching parts of her life that would have felt strange at one point, that don't anymore.

She has to drag her furniture out of her bedroom. Her father is home - for once - and doesn't say anything, just raises one eyebrow as she tells him she's doing some renovations on the room.

This time, she lays down a tarp over the carpet. It makes sense to do it right. And then, with the window open and the ladder from the shed, she paints the ceiling. She starts at the edges, where the green meets the white. She starts with the darkest blue and gradients it lighter near the middle.

It takes awhile to get it right. It's soothing, somehow. Comforting. The even strokes of the paintbrush are rhythmic to her ears, even though her shoulders are burning halfway through from the strange angle. She takes a break and eats a sandwich, and then keeps going. Her father is asleep and the house is quiet, and she keeps painting until the sun comes up.

She turns her ceiling into the night sky, with the full moon in the middle.

When she's done, she lays down on the tarp over the carpet, arms stretched wide to either side, and looks up at the drying scene that's turning colors with the sunrise streaming in through the windows. She's not afraid of the moon, anymore. She's not a wolf. She's not a human. She's just Lydia, just as she's always been. She'll be pack on her _own_ terms.

Exhaustion should be wearing her down, she's been up all night - instead, she's exhilarated.

Her phone buzzes.

"Stiles?" she asks, answering it. There is blue paint streaked across the back of her hand.

"Derek's called a meeting," Stiles says through the receiver. "There's an alpha pack in town."

Lydia looks up at the moon on her ceiling.

"Okay," she says. "Pick me up in ten?"


End file.
